Anne Enright - The Forgotten Waltz

Malachy O’Boyle sat back in his swivel chair and, in his easy, adenoidal way, told them Evie had bumped her head, and that she would be fine. It was also possible, he thought, that she had suffered an event, a convulsion or seizure, what people used to call a fit. He was by no means sure of this, and even if she had, most children who do never have a second one. But just so they were aware of it. Just so they could keep an eye.

They left his room and they paid the receptionist fifty-five euros. Then they went out to the car. Aileen said, ‘We are going to casualty.’ She was white and trembling in the passenger seat beside him. Seán said, ‘It’s Friday evening.’

But they went to casualty, and they sat in casualty for four-and-a-half hours, in order to be seen by a tired girl in a white coat who repeated pretty much what the fake-Irish GP had said. The girl, who looked about sixteen, resisted all talk of seizures and MRI scans, allowed that she could keep Evie in for observation but it would have to be on a trolley. And so they sat, or paced, or stood beside the trolley where Evie slept the delicious, heartbreaking sleep of a child, while, all around them, Friday-night Dublin wept, bled and cursed (and that was just the porters, as Aileen tartly said). They had one plastic chair between them. From time to time, Seán bent over the end of his daughter’s mattress, and set his head on his folded arms, where he lurched asleep for thirty seconds at a time.

They stayed, itching with tiredness, until, at ten o’clock in the morning, a more important-looking doctor swept past, checked the metal clipboard, pulled Evie’s eyelids open, one at a time, and with a breezy bit of banter, gave them all permission to go home. They had no idea who he was – as Aileen pointed out later, he might have been a cleaner in drag – but they were, by this stage, pliable, grateful, almost animal. All their normal human competency was gone. The rules had changed.

Aileen swung, in the next while, from efficiency to uselessness. She bullied or she froze; there was nothing in-between. She became convinced, after many late nights on various websites, that there was something seriously wrong. Evie had been crying out in her sleep for months – perhaps a year – before she fell off the swing, and sometimes they found her confused and on her bedroom floor. Aileen dragged the child around three different GPs (‘The medical equivalent of a stage mother,’ as Seán described her), until she got a referral for a paediatric neurologist with a two-month waiting list, and that night she got, for the first time since he had known her, rat-arsed on champagne.

Meanwhile, the au pair did not so much leave as flounce out, and although they needed another, and urgently, Aileen stalled at the idea of ringing the agency again. She took half days off work, and sometimes made Seán take the other half, she rang neighbours and got babysitters in. The childcare, which had been until then a smooth enough affair – at least as far as he was concerned – became insoluble. It was as though she did not want it to work, he realised, one day when the handover went astray, and she ended up screaming down the phone at him: You said two o’clock but you meant three o’clock. How many lies is that? How many lies are there, in a whole fucking hour?

The guilt and the worry had overwhelmed her, she said later. She just wanted to stay with Evie, all the time.

And Seán said, ‘She’s fine.’

It happened at breakfast time. Evie was always a joy in the morning – ‘You put them to bed screaming,’ Seán said, ‘and they wake up all new.’ Evie sat up in bed at first light and read a book – or just talked to the pictures – then got up at the sound of the alarm clock to slip between her waking parents. She talked non-stop, she wandered and chatted and got distracted. Her mornings were spent in a state of loveliness and forgetting: looking in her wardrobe and not remembering to dress, helping to make the porridge then letting it go cold, trying to walk out the door before she had located her shoes.

On this morning, she was neglecting her porridge for a black-and-white stuffed hen, which she danced across the table with squawks and cluckings, in the middle of which she rolled her eyes back and slid on to the floor. Seán watched her for many seconds before he even tried to make sense of what was happening. Under the table, Evie shook and rattled. Her eyes were open and fixed. She didn’t look at him, but at the wall behind her head, and what disturbed Seán, in retrospect, was the gentle, thoughtful look he saw in her eyes, like someone examining the idea of pain. Her hands were clenched, her right foot throbbed or kicked, and it seemed to him that her body was outraged by her brain’s betrayal, and was fighting to regain control. This was an illusion, he knew, but nothing could quite convince Seán that Evie was not suffering. She made small mewling sounds, as tiny and uncomprehending as when she was newborn, and her mouth drooled and snapped.

Aileen had pulled the chair back, to give her space. She stood over her daughter. Then she ducked down quickly to cushion her head from the hard tiles.

‘Don’t,’ said Seán, who had some idea that Evie should not be touched, at all.

‘Don’t what?’

Aileen’s calm was almost unnatural. She held her daughter by the shoulders, then slipped easily on to the floor and set Evie’s head on her lap, reaching up to hold on to the tabletop with her free hand.

Seán remembered this image with great clarity: the unflattering fold of fat between her knee and thigh, and Aileen, usually so fastidious, with drool smearing her skirt.

Meanwhile, Evie’s clenched hands pumped more slowly, and her lips seemed almost blue.

She was not breathing, he thought.

Evie bucked and bucked and then stopped. She looked as though she had forgotten something. Then, after a moment of great emptiness, her body pulled in a rasping breath. After this came another breath. Aileen rubbed and patted her, making soothing, whimpering sounds and it took a long time to bring the child back to herself – or perhaps none of it took a long time, perhaps the whole thing happened in a very short time; it just felt endless and messy. Evie was confused, Aileen was confused, calling her name, rubbing her back and arms. And then, something shifted and caught.

Evie sat up. She roared. She struggled out of her mother’s restraining arms; outraged, calling the world to account.

He was so proud of her.

There are times when Seán seems to blame me for the failure of his marriage, but he never blames me for what happened to Evie. I coaxed it all out of him on the car journeys we took down to the west; the beautiful small roads along the Shannon beyond Limerick: Pallaskenry, Ballyvogue, Oola, Foynes. We drove with the wide river showing through sun-dappled trees; Seán concentrating on the driving, me safely dressed, neither of us looking at the other, sitting side by side.

Talking about her makes him simple. Seán, a man, as he would himself admit, addicted to winning and to losing – when Evie got ill, all that fell away, and the world opened up to them in a way that amazes him yet.

The morning Evie had the seizure, Aileen rang the neurologist’s office where they had an appointment in a fortnight’s time. They were on their way into casualty. Aileen was in the back of the car, holding Evie around her seat belt, and managing the phone. The doctor’s secretary said, ‘Hang on a minute,’ and she put her hand over the mouthpiece. Then she came back on to say, ‘Dr Prentice will send down the team.’

‘Sorry?’

‘When you come to casualty. Dr Prentice will see you after you talk to her team.’

And she did.

It was, for those first few hours, a kind of bliss. A doctor, two doctors, a bed in the day ward. The consultant arrived; a small, profoundly powerful woman, trussed up in a navy crêpe suit. The consultant was kind. She allowed for an MRI scan and an EEG. She used the word ‘benign’, which made them think about brain tumours. She wrote a prescription. She said a lot of nice and reassuring things, many of which were hard to remember.